In the book we’re reading on Cahokia, Timothy R. Pauketat spends a lot of time on the human sacrifices and burial rituals that were so prevalent in the city. What stood out to me was the way that important men were buried, specifically the beads so present in their burial mounds. Pauketat describes the “beaded burial” (Pauketat, 73) of two important men. Their bones were wrapped in cloth and placed on top of animal pelts and thousands of shell beads sewn onto a now-decomposed piece of fabric. This made me very curious about the significance of beads in Cahokia, as well as where they came from and how they were modified.

The “beaded burial” site can shed a lot of light on the importance of beads. Shell beads were likely used as a marker of status, seeing as “over 32,700 columella beads … from Mound 72 were associated with high status women,” and “most LW [abbreviation of lightning whelk] beads were buried with mound mortuaries … associated with higher status individuals” (Kozuch, 65). There is also earlier research stating that marine shells were likely reserved for only the highest class citizens (Holley, in Kozuch, 67). It’s very interesting to reflect on how items that are currently seen as worthless were once so important. The city of Cahokia, including the greater surrounding area, had many bead-crafting workshops. These could be identified through specific tools that would’ve been used to form shells into beads (Mason, Perino, and Morse, in Kozuch, 67). The existence of these bead workshops, and the thousands upon thousands of beads used in burials, indicate that Cahokians saw beads as a symbol of status and wealth, much as modern society views precious gems. However, it wasn’t as if shells were reserved for only the rich. There was a large “presence of marine shells at non-elite Mississippian residences” (Prentice, 207). To me, this could create a hierarchy of beads: rare ones such as the lightning whelk shells were owned by elites, while common ones were dispersed among the masses. This makes sense, considering Cahokia’s proximity to the Mississippi river, but conflicts with Holley’s earlier research that says the opposite.

The abundance of shells and the many bead workshops at Cahokia made me a bit curious about trade in the region. It is clear that trade routes existed in the ancient Americas, and shells were transported along these routes (Prentice, 200). Many theories exist, including ones about shells being used as money or being traded at set prices (Prentice, 200 – 207), but these are unproven. Seeing as Cahokia was such a large city and important trading center, it is an understandable conclusion that some level of shell trade took place.

Reference list:

• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01976931211048205
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/20708256?seq=1

Additional reading:

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/march/12/cahokia.htm
• https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/391694

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie was an influential archaeologist who primarily worked in Egyptology. He published around 1,000 pieces on ancient through medieval Egypt, but is most well-known for his work on ancient Egyptian pottery seriation. He is credited with inventing seriation as a whole, which is the practice of organizing artifacts in chronological order. In 1901, Flinders Petrie created a revolutionary pottery seriation chart based on predynastic burial sites at Abadiyeh and Hu, which organized pottery into different classes and ages. These classes include incised black, polished red, wavy-handled, and so on. His methodology combined stratigraphy and visual cues, but unfortunately, he often included personal biases and wild theories in his findings. Much of Flinders Petrie’s findings have been revised or debunked. However, his invention of seriation has been adopted by most archaeologists, and is still used today. It was the best form of dating before modern methods, such as radiocarbon dating.

Using seriation, Flinders Petrie aimed to determine the ages of various burial sites. He had assistants draw the pots he found, then he organized them into types and ages. He noted that though form stayed the same, styles varied, which allowed him to further narrow down the age of the graves. Because of the unique style of the burials (not mummies, positioned bodies, etc), Flinders Petrie actually decided that he had discovered a new race, rather than the graves being Egyptian. This demonstrates that although seriation can provide relative ages for sites, it does not determine what the content actually means.

Other than Egypt, Flinders Petrie worked on sites in Palestine and Britain, and made discoveries concerning Greece and Israel. On many of these occasions, he applied seriation. Aside from pottery, he conducted research on homes, the pyramids, ancient cities, papyrus scrolls, and much more. His life consisted of numerous important contributions to archaeology (he was even knighted for them), and he died at age 89 in Jerusalem.

Of course, seriation is not only used for pottery. It can be used for almost any artifact, at any site, and anywhere in the world. It can even be applied to disciplines such as art history. In the textbook, the example given was about gravestones in Massachusetts and how their design indicates what time period they were made. They are extremely far removed – physically and temporally – from predynastic Egypt, yet the same technique can be applied to both burial sites. Though Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie had his fair share of strange ideas, his invention of seriation has, and will, remain a staple of archaeological dating methods.

Sources:

https://the-past.com/shorts/the-picture-desk/flinders-petries-sequence-dating-chart/ (info + photo)
https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explore-our-collection/highlights/context/patrons-donors-collectors/william-matthew-flinders-petrie (info)
https://www.whipplelib.hps.cam.ac.uk/special/exhibitions-and-displays/conflicting-chronologies/establishing-predynastic-egypt (info + photo)
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Flinders-Petrie (info)

Other references:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwYk9-U8H5k

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG62763